What is social media marketing (SMM)?: A Comprehensive Guide

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A lot of people spend most of their time online these days and where there’s smoke there’s fire. The whole point of marketing is to get whatever you are selling to the eyes of the people or your audience. The world’s digital population is growing every minute and all that translates into social media marketing having the potential to increase your brand reach to all over the world.

Before the dawn of the digital age, people used to abide by the traditional ways of marketing their products and services and that is slowly declining as the social media multiverse is taking over. People used to watch MTV, but now they don’t – you know why?

Because there are platforms like Netflix, YouTube, Tiktok, and Rumble, people like to control what they are watching rather than having MTV decide what to show next.

To give you a glimpse of how much the TV channels have fallen – Since 2010 viewing on traditional TV dropped by over a quarter among 16-24 year olds and children.

The trend is even similar in adults having dropped by over 20% and from the looks of it, things are only going to get worse. 

Now, where are these viewers going?

Social Media Obviously – the whole point of having a TV is for entertainment purposes and if people are now getting entertained elsewhere they are bound to go there.

And not only that social media does more than just entertainment. People use social media platforms to communicate and interact with each other – To Social Network. This is a huge factor driving people to these social media platforms because not only are they communicating with themselves but the entire globe as well.

So as a Business Owner or Marketer what do you do? You go Fishing. Like I said where there is smoke there is fire!

In this article am going to share with you, how you can use that massive pool of potential leads to your advantage in what is known as Social Media Marketing (SMM).

What is Social Media Marketing?

That’s the big question – and the answer is really simple.

Social media marketing is a type of digital marketing that makes use of the strength of well-known social media platforms to meet your branding and marketing objectives.

This form of marketing is more than just shit posting your products on Twitter and expecting to get sales.

You have to create an adaptive strategy and implement it over time. By adaptive, I mean your strategy must be able to change and follow the wave of the latest trends on social media.

I can even advise you to use the latest trends on social media to boost your SMM marketing game.

Be careful of using the wrong trends as this might end in tragedy and you know we are always ready to add your marketing campaign to the hall of fame – the biggest marketing failures of all time.

When creating your social media marketing campaign always remember to do the following:

• Optimizing your Social Media Profiles
• Keep posting, 1 post per day or more if possible
• Responding to fanbase feedback especially comments.
• Monitor your posts and see what works and what doesn’t

Benefits of Social Media Marketing

Social media has grown to be the most prominent and significant virtual realm, where users may promote their brands and goods using the platform for more than just social networking.

Given the number of people using social media platforms, this comes as an advantage in the marketing business.

Heck, that’s how social media platforms make money anyway, by selling allowing companies to sell ads on the platforms and that has made social networks like Facebook become one of the richest companies in the world.

This itself is living proof that the Ads on social media work really well in driving target traffic or sales to companies promoting their products on the platform.

Here are the benefits of social media marketing:

You can grow your audience with a small/no budget at all

If you think about it. It is really easy to grow a social media profile. All you need to do is keep posting consistently and also make sure the content you are posting is interesting.

People will naturally follow an account posting relevant and useful information. So now the big question is how can I post relevant and interesting information?

Choose a keyword!

Paste in the keyword and once you get all these related keywords, it’s time to use them to generate Social Media Post ideas using AnswerThePublic.

I used hiking in this example.

Answer the public is also a free tool you can use to generate FAQ questions and what you are going to do is answer those questions generated by AnswerThePublic using social media posts.

By answering those questions you are now providing value to the people and that will translate into more engagement and more engagement will lead to more followers, and you guessed it.

More followers mean more traffic to your website and more sales and leads. Without spending a dym – just using free tools. I will show you how to create Infographics later in this article.

Build REAL relationships with your target customers

Somebody remind me what “social” networks were made for – exactly, for connecting with the world. Instead of family and friends why not customers?

Using the power of social networks to your advantage. Customers will be able to ask you pre-sale questions and hopefully, you will be around to respond fast to their questions.

If you are kind enough and provide a really good service – your customers will become your organic marketers. They will spread the word about your brand without you even asking them am sure you’ve done that yourself.

Let me know in the comments which product you organically marketed without the company asking you to do it. Me – “BMWs”.

When your customers love your brand that much, they will even defend you against critics on social media. Use social media to create your own brand soldiers by treating people well and responding to their DMs.

Increase your brand awareness

If you post consistently enough people will start to notice you. Your brand will start showing up on #foryou pages. People start to know you and from there on it’s a piece of cake.

Once people know about you or your brand you will start to notice your fanbase growing this might take time to happen but remain consistent in your posting.

For example, look at our Instagram profiles. We 2 or more posts every day and it’s been helping grow the profile. We are aiming to reach 10k followers by end of 2023.

Drive Traffic to your Website

Don’t forget to sprinkle those links across some of your posts that have relevant articles on your website.

In fact, during the infancy of your blog, the majority of the traffic will come from social media networks.

Keep in mind that social media platforms get tons of traffic per day, for example, Facebooks get over 1.62 Billion visitors every day and am sure they don’t mind you stealing a bit of that traffic.

Platforms that drive massive traffic the most are:

• Pinterest
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Maybe Tiktok(People don’t like leaving TikTok following some link – believe me)

Social Media Statistics

More than 4.7 billion people use social media every day and that is half of the world’s population honestly why not use Social Media Marketing? Having that many people as potential customers is just insane. Obviously, not all of them will see your posts but a few million are enough to skyrocket your business.

Below are the social media marketing statistics you all need to know.

• 84% of 18-to-29-year-olds in the US are active social media users.
• People spend an average of 2 hours and 25 minutes per day on social media.
• Nearly 80% of Twitter users feel more positive about a business when they get a response to their tweet.
• Nearly half of people rely on recommendations from social media influencers.
• 46% of TikTok users engage in the app without any other distractions.
• 93% of US businesses use and are active on Facebook.

How Social Media Marketing Help our business

When we were starting out, lyncteck barely got traffic from the Search Engines and we had to improvise. After hours of research and doing everything we can to get more traffic to our website, we made the following findings.

• Social Media Drove most of the traffic to our website during the early days
• Social Media increased our brand recognition
• We established some connection with our audience and not just that, we also got the opportunity to partner up with other bloggers. In short – we established connections
• Pinterest and Quora drove the most traffic to our website

I used to answer questions occasionally on Quora and post in them, links back to this website. After a while, I noticed quora is driving a bit of traffic to our website.

Then I started to answer more questions and traffic started to increase – I also got a bit of followers on Quora. I even launched a space called – “Online Business Hub”.

Here’s a quick peek at my Quora Page during the first days.

Creating Your Own Social Media Strategy

A social media strategy is, to put it simply, a plan that specifies your social media goals, the strategies you’ll employ to accomplish them, and the metrics you’ll track to gauge your success.

It’s time to create those goals and to make it simple here is a template you can follow to lay out your social media marketing strategy.

1. Set Goals for your business – Spending effort on this step will be worthwhile since it will affect the remainder of your plan. Understand and define your social media goals.
2. Choose your Platform – Just choose all platforms don’t just stick to one social network – look at what happened to Tumblr. Now imagine if your entire business relied only on Tumblr.
3. Research Your Audience – You must comprehend who your audience is and what they desire in order to develop a unique message and content. The easiest method to do it is to carry out market research via internet surveys, consumer interviews, or by organizing a focus group.
4. Plan your content – In this stage you create a content calendar and schedule posts to be released regularly and frequently enough. Not too much posting not too little but just the right amount of posting is required to have an engaging audience.

Social Media Marketing Tips and Tricks

One of the best tips I can give you about social media marketing is to post frequently and never skip a day without posting. Especially in social networks like Instagram and Twitter, people from those networks really like to see updates every day because let’s face it no one uses Twitter for DM-ing their friends and family. People use Twitter because they want to know what’s up, the new stuff in their industry, and some shit posts from the Twitter god Elon Musk.

The same goes for Instagram and what that all means is for you to keep providing content people love every day. For Twitter, it’s very easy to come up with something to post and you don’t need any visuals.

For Instagram, you are going to need a graphic designer, or alternatively, you can use Canva it is really easy to use, even someone from the early 19th century can easily create a beautiful infographic to post on social media.

Keep reading to know how to design and post an infographic in less than 2 minutes.

The next tip is to know not to choose a platform.

Wait, Bheki WHAT?

Yeah, I see a lot of articles about creating a social media marketing strategy telling readers to “choose a marketing platform wisely”.

Well, don’t the trick is to join every social media platform you know, doesn’t matter which one just join everything. Pinterest, Tumblr, LinkedIn, ..everything even OnlyFans.

Okay, not OnlyFans – but you get my point. Be available everywhere and maximize your chances of driving massive traffic to your website or landing page. It’s a numbers game honestly.

Final verdict – Don’t stick to one social media platform, it’s bad for business. Imagine if Twitter shuts down and you don’t have any other social media presence. What will happen to all that traffic you used to have? Gone right?

My last tip would be to post content with emotion. Connect your posts to a true life story, a customer review, or a success story, why? because those kinds of posts have the highest engagement.

“It’s the stories that sell, not the product” – A famous saying

To add on that – “People buy the why not the what”

The best social media Platforms

For new blogs, Pinterest tends to be the best social network to drive massive traffic to your website. It is very easy to create a Pinterest Account. If you don’t have one go create one now, you might be missing out on a whole lot of traffic.

For Established Businesses, Twitter is your guy. Twitter is widely used by entrepreneurs and is usually the best place to create a trending hashtag about your product. The best way to promote using Twitter is to tell your audience how your particular product or service has solved a problem people are facing. Reply to big brands when they shit post, it is another great way to get recognition.

Instagram is for the Influencers. Instagram is all about pictures, if your business can be expressed in a picture then perfect because Instagram is another great way to sell your product or service on social media.

I can keep going all day here are some other popular social networks for your social media marketing campaign.

• Tiktok
• Facebook
• Reddit (falls under social network right?)
• Quora
• Telegram

How to create social media posts using Canva

The part that most of you were waiting for is finally here.

Don’t have a Canva account? Go create one, it’s completely free and easy to get started. So, create an account, and let’s meet on the page below.

Once you get to this page search for “<your social network> post” in the search bar and in this example am going to use an Instagram post.

After that select, a template you want and all you have to do is change the text and color to match your company brand.

Download the post or directly share it on social media by connecting your social media accounts to Canva. With Canva Pro you can schedule posts to be published at a later date and specific time.

I mean given that you can create 100 hundred posts in an hour, you don’t want to publish them all at once and Canva solves that by providing you with an in-built content scheduler. No need for an external service.

Conclusion

There you have it folks, social media marketing in a nutshell, I hope you enjoyed the post, what do you think is the best marketing type for an Online Business

• Affiliate Marketing?
• Content Marketing?
• Social Media Marketing?

Let us know in the comment or tag us on Twitter with your reply @lyncteck.

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